The Hunter From the Woods (42 page)

A few days, Rittenkrett had said.

Michael thought: That gives
me
a few days.

If I can survive the night.

He had more stamina and resistance to pain as a wolf. When he became a man again, he was going to need crutches and a long sleep. So…among the pigeons with rifles and the sheep with machine guns stalks the wolf. But he had the feeling that the closer he got to the Black Sun, the more he was going to need everything the wolf could give him.

A slight movement to his right suddenly riveted his attention. Down at the far end of the alley.

What was that down there? He sniffed the air, and smelled…

A white dog, dirty but still white enough, came a step closer and then stopped. Its ears were up, and it too was sniffing the air. Smelling his blood, Michael knew. He took a whiff of essence: female.

Another dog appeared at its side. Small and brown. A sausage dog. Male.

A third one nosed up beside the female. Another female, sand-colored with a long snout. She was mottled with sores, and Michael could smell her sickness.

They all stood still, watching him. The snow fell down and the wind blew, and Michael Gallatin shivered and felt the blood running out of him.

A fourth dog moved through the others.

They parted to give him way. No wonder. He was the man. A big black Doberman with powerful haunches and eyes the color of amber stones. He got between the wolf and his charges and stared fixedly at the new arrival, which meant
Do you want to
fight?

Michael Gallatin, for all his size and the fact that even as wounded as he was he could tear them to shreds in a matter of seconds, put his head down almost to the concrete and rounded his shoulders.

No, I don’t
, he replied.

The Doberman remained in guard position. Michael suspected that had been his job, before life in an alley. The white dog started to come forward, and the Doberman gave a whuff of
Stay
and pushed her with his snout. She stayed; she was his bitch.

The dogs of Berlin, Michael thought. The castoff pets, the companions of dead people, the unwanted and unloved. Now scavaging for whatever they could find in the garbage cans, and living…
where
, exactly?

The bitch with the sores on her body came up beside him. She sniffed at him, and to be polite he returned the compliment. She regarded him with eyes full of pain and, perhaps, true wonder. She was old. In her last days, her aroma said. Thin and diseased and homeless: a hopeless triad.

She came closer. He could tell she’d seen a lot, this old one had. Had seen a hearth and bedroom slippers. Had seen maybe a child’s joy. And a mother’s sadness, too. There was a lot in there. She had a regal air about her, a self-possessed dignity. Michael thought she was like an empress whose lovely domain had one day suddenly crumbled around her, through no fault or doing of her own. Possibly it was one of the bombs.

The little sausage crept up and, very carefully, sniffed. He couldn’t reach what he was after. When Michael shifted one inch, the sausage yelped and skittered away.

Then the white dog came, the beauty. The one who in another life would be companion to a fashion model in Paris and lie about on velvet cushions politely asking for liver treats. She came cautiously, stopping and then coming again, step by graceful step.

The Empress spoke in a low throaty grunt:
He’s okay
. Then the Beauty came on the last few paces, but she was trembling a little, like any high-spirited female might be in the presence of such a wounded monster, and she was ready to run.

Finally, then, the Doberman arrived.

He took stock of Michael at a distance, and with a sidelong appraisal. He sniffed the air, gave a quiet growl to let everyone know who was the Commander of this army, and then he pretended to look everywhere but at the wolf. The snow whitened his coat, and he gnawed at himself out of petulant irritation. Then, abruptly, he came right up to Michael and stood staring at an ear while the wolf, for the sake of getting along, gazed directly at the ground.

A tongue licked him. Just slightly. Darting in and away.

The Empress had found his gunshot wound.

The Little Sausage ran around in a circle, snapping at some memory of table scraps.

Then the Commander nudged Michael’s ribs with his muzzle. A nudge neither hard nor soft, just testing the bones. The message was:
Maybe we can use you
.

Michael was thinking the same thing.

The dogs drew away from him and began to trot toward the far end of the alley. The Empress turned back and waited, and then one by one the others stopped to wait too, until finally the Commander paused, one foreleg raised in a military pose.

Are you coming?
was the pack’s question.

Michael Gallatin lifted his face to the sky and felt the softness of the snow. He felt also the oncoming dawn, far before the light arrived. He thought that the pack must have found or dug a shelter somewhere. He wondered if the Empress knew all the underground tunnels where the trains used to run when Berlin was a city with a heart, a soul and a mind.

The Black Sun.

He realized he might be the only one who knew. The only one who’d ever heard of it. Well, he’d let someone kill him some other day. When he was good and ready to die. When his job was finished.

But this wouldn’t be the day.

The dogs were waiting for him.

Michael thought that sometime soon he would find a silent place. A place where he could stand without being seen. A place where he could look out across the city and the sky. And in that place he would howl to the stars, he would howl to God, he would howl for the injustice and insanity of this world and he would howl for her.

My Franziska.

But for the rest of this night, perhaps only just this one, he would sleep among the angels.

And, undefeated, Michael Gallatin struggled on.

Death Of A Hunter

When he found the gray wolf dead with its throat cut and its eyes gouged out, Michael Gallatin knew they had come for him.

He sat in a brown leather chair in the front room of his house, which had once been a church and was to him still a holy place of solitude and reflection. The structure was made of dark red stones chinked together with white mortar. It had a narrow tower topped with a white spire and a walkway around it. Up in the tower were panes of stained glass colored crimson and dark blue.

Darkness was gathering outside, across the dense Welsh forest that shielded Michael Gallatin’s home from the rest of the world. It was the eleventh day of July in the year 1958. He was listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s
The Lark Ascending
on his record player. He knew that when the music was over and full darkness had fallen, he would get up from this chair in which he’d sat so many times, listening to music or reading before a polite fire, and he would go out to meet them.

Because they had come for him. And he doubted if he would ever return to this house the same as he’d left it, if he returned at all.

They were professionals. They were killers of the highest order. How many there would be, awaiting him out in the night-black forest, he didn’t know. But they had executed one of his wolves—one of his companions—and he knew that if he did not go out to meet them tonight another wolf would die in his place. They wouldn’t stop until all his companions were dead, murdered by the fast blade and then mutilated by some brutal Oriental instrument, and he could not—
would
not—allow that to happen.

So he sat in the company of the music, waiting for the dark.

He wore black shoes with soft soles, gray trousers and a dark blue cotton shirt. The air was warm outside, unseasonably warm even for the middle of summer in Wales.

The hunter’s moon would be shaped like a scythe tonight, perfect for cutting down old things that no longer had much use in this world.

He was a hard-used forty-eight years old. His thick hair had turned fully gray on the sides, with a small thatch of gray at the front. His face was still ruggedly handsome and his eyes were still luminously green, yet he knew how slow he’d become. He knew the onset of age. He knew what had been and what was to be, if he lived through this night. He was not the man he used to be, nor for that matter the wolf.

He thought of getting up and pouring himself a glass of Talisker, his favorite brand of Scotch whisky from the isle of Skye, but he decided against that. It had the salt taste of the sea in it, which he so enjoyed. One drink would be a pleasure, but one drink might give the killers a further advantage. No, if he lived through this night he would drink a toast to his miraculous survival at the dawn. But he doubted very seriously if he would ever taste Talisker again.

His left shoulder had been bothering him today. The shoulder he’d broken in the crash of a Westland Lysander aircraft in the North African desert in 1941. It was stiff and altogether unyielding to his will. His right leg today was also a traitor; it had been snapped in two places as he was caught in an avalanche on Monte Leone in 1952, when he’d been on the trail of the infamous professor of murder Dr. Shatterhand and his doxy of death Sabrina Neve. He had a headache that came and went, the nagging reminder of many fists, blackjacks and other items intended to knock his brains out. It was a wonder he still had any brains left at all.

He checked his Rolex. On the table next to him was a glass case that held a Breitling wristwatch with a plain brown leather band. He kept the watch working, though he never wore it. The watch was not his to wear.

The music ended, on its soft high lingering note.

He stood up. The darkness outside was almost complete. He took off the Rolex, took off his shoes, took off his socks, took off his trousers and underwear and shirt. He went out the door into the summer night, and drawing a long breath of fragrant pines and green moss he thought he might never come home again.

But he was certain he was going to kill at least one of them tonight. He would not go easy. He would not go without demanding a price be paid.

Opening the soul cage was more difficult than it used to be. The hinges creaked a little. The wolf balked, wanting to stay comfortable. It came when it was beckoned and it answered its call, but it was an older wolf, a slower wolf, and it had become a little bit hesitant of the pain of change.

Because the pain was the one thing that had not diminished. If anything, the pain had increased by many times. It was a hard birth for the wolf now, and a hard rebirth back to Michael Gallatin the man. Older bones for both wolf and man made the change slower, in each direction. The pain was exquisite. The pain that brought the scents, sounds, colors and forms in an explosion upon the senses unknown to ordinary men was almost too much to bear.

Almost…but then there always came the power, and though that had also diminished it was still the alpha and omega of the wolf, and it was still worth the journey from man to beast and back again.

He walked past his dark green Range Rover. He changed, as he stood in front of his church. He changed, in the dark with the yellow scythe of the moon hanging amid the clouds. He changed under a million million stars. Maybe he shuddered in pain and shed a few tears, but he changed.

He had never asked for this. Had never dreamed of it, when as an eight-year-old boy in Russia he’d followed a drifting white kite into a forest just like the one here in Wales he was about to penetrate. He’d never asked for this; it had been thrust upon him, whether he’d wanted it or not.

And now, as he contorted into a green-eyed wolf with more gray hair than black on its flanks and a certain injured stiffness in its stride, he thought how all these many years he had not been a hunter from the woods so much as he’d been a wanderer in the wilderness. It was the fate of all humans to wander in a wilderness, some made for them by others, some made by themselves. And the wilderness could be all of life, from beginning to end. A trackless wilderness that held no reference points nor easy places of rest. It was a place of hard demands and no acceptance of mistakes. It was a place that whittled a man of action down to a sleeper in a brown leather chair on a Sunday afternoon. And it was a place that could be so terribly lonely that the heart broke into a thousand pieces at the merest memory of a woman’s name and her touch in the night.

Michael could not go there. Not to that place. So he put his wolfen head down, and his wolfen body propelled itself forward, and though the old aches and agonies whispered through him and wanted to slow him down he loped onward into the woods, nearly soundlessly, his eyes seeking movement in the tangles of trees and folds of vegetation. They were here. They were close. Tonight there would be death.

Death had always been at his shoulder. It had always been leering at him, in the faces of many enemies. As he ran, searching, he thought of his trial by fire on the Caribbean island of Augustin Mireaux, the industrialist who had sold his soul and his nuclear missile plans to the Red Chinese. He thought of his battle against the drug-created assassin known as Chameleon that had begun in Paris, moved to Rio de Janeiro and ended in the Amazon jungle. He thought of his narrow escape with Aurore Bardot from Edward Wintergarden’s sinking submarine under the polar ice. He recalled Simon Tollemache’s barracuda pool, and the bloody massacre on the golf course at St. Andrews. He remembered Tragg, the killer with hypnotic eyes and two-tone shoes. He could trace in his memory every step through the deadly funhouse of Phaninath Po. All those and more remained in his head, though some he fervently wished he might forget. He wished he might forget about the Ginshi Kazoku—the Family of the Silver Thread—and the murder of the man he’d known as Mallory, but he could not.